The Ancient Myths That Produced Many Religions
(Including a very famous one that still survives)
“When the facts get in the way of our beliefs, our brains
are marvelously adept at dispensing with the facts.”
Humans have long sought solace in the face of adversity and to find answers to the great questions. Is this all there is? Where did we come from? Is there a “soul” and do I have one? Is death really final? For hundreds of thousands of years, people have turned to a myriad of religions for comfort and answers. When I was a teenager, I found religion to be helpful as I gazed in wonder at the world around me, hungry for answers.
Thousands of years ago, in order to answer such questions, hundreds of itinerant prophets roamed the Middle East and other earthly regions purveying their particular religions with their own myths to support them. They were, to use a modern phrase, “a dime a dozen.” It was a time of superstition and ignorance, long before they were supplanted by knowledge and science.
Over time, long before 0 A.D., elements of various religions were extracted and assembled into new religions. Religions have undergone elemental and routine borrowing and, yes, evolution.
Common myths advanced by these ancient prophets — Osiris, Dionysus, Tammus, Horus, and others — included the following:
God came to earth as a human, born of a virgin.
His birth was prophesized by a star in the heavens.
Later, he turned water into wine.
He gathered 12 disciples.
He rode triumphantly into a city on a donkey.
He healed the sick, exorcised demons, and provided miraculous meals.
He was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver.
He died, as a sacrifice for the sins of the world by being hung on a tree, a stake, or a cross — depending on the prophet’s tale.
On the third day after his death, three women found his burial place empty.
He returned to life and, later, ascended into heaven.
He will return in the “last days” to judge the human race.
Sound familiar?
All these ancient prophetic myths occurred in various prophecies hundreds of years before Jesus was supposed to have been born. All that had to be done to create the most famous of these primitive religions, what we call today Christianity, was to bring all the previous myths into an assembled work. That was done after ca. AD 45 over several centuries in what we would recognize today as being akin to political conventions. There were intense battles over what books would be included in the assembled work, the New Testament. Votes were taken. Favored essays were discarded and included. Eventually, after centuries of work, its 27 books, which were written by numerous authors, all born long after Jesus allegedly lived, were gradually collected into a single volume.
In short, Christianity is an assembly of much earlier myths, and its New Testament is a political document in which all these ancient myths are brought together in a single tome.
In my youth, I did not know these things. Now that I am grown up and do understand that all religions are myths I feel freed from them. I can face the world realizing that reality is what we see before us in nature, and that science provides all the answers that we know. It does not bother me that we do not know all the answers, nor that it is likely humanity ever will. I do not need religious myths to provide the answers, because they do not. In the last analysis, they are just that — myths.
I understand why most people today wind up as “believers” in one religion or another. Most were likely indoctrinated by their parents as impressionable children before they could reach the age of reason, thus keeping the religious cycle going. Believing gives such people comfort and answers so that they need not be confused by the world before them. Everything becomes “God’s will.” That is easy and comforting for them.
This would be fine were it not for the tendency of believers in one religion to find believers in other religions intolerable, often producing violent wars. Thus we found Catholics and Protestants in violent confrontations in Northern Ireland. Sunnis and Shias battle over who is the alleged real descendant of Muhammad. Muslims believe those who do not believe in their religion are infidels to be killed. Jews believe they have a divine basis for claiming lands in the Middle East, and Muslims hate them accordingly – with 60 years of wars, and counting, the result. Believers of all stripes hate nonbelievers — attacking them, at a minimum, with aggression and profanity.
Perhaps there are really two global crises facing mankind and its planet. One is environmental degradation and global warming. The other is that most people (if the polls can be believed) adopt religious beliefs with a sense of surety and certainty that theirs is the one true religion and that it alone represents the truth, and is not myth. Too often, this breeds a need to eliminate those who do not share that religion or do not believe in any religion.
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